2017 Volume 24 Issue 1 Pages 3-47
We have developed an active listening system for a conversation robot, specifically for reminiscing. The aim of the system is to contribute to the prevention of dementia in elderly persons and to reduce loneliness in seniors living alone. Based on the speech recognition results from a user’s utterance, the proposed system produces back-channel feedback, repeats the user’s utterance and asks information about predicates that were not included in the original utterance. Moreover, the system produces an appropriate empathic response by estimating the user’s emotion from their utterances. One of the features of our system is that it can determine an appropriate response even if the speech recognition results contain some errors. Our results show that the conversations of 45.5% of the subjects (n = 110) with this robot continued for more than two minutes on the topic “memorable trip”. The system response was deemed correct for about 77% of user utterances. Based on the results of a questionnaire, positive evaluations of the system were given by the elderly subjects.
